St. Vincent: "Cruel"

Director's Cutfeatures interviews with the people behind today's best music videos.

Truly simpatico music video director/artist pairings, like Spike Jonze and Beastie Boys or Michel Gondry and the White Stripes, don't occur that often. But the directing team Terri Timely (aka Ian Kibbey and Corey Creasey) and St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark) have a good streak going with their three collaborative clips: "Actor Out of Work", "Marrow", and their newest and best video, "Cruel". Kibbey and Creasey's manicured, creepy, and deadpan style is a perfect fit for Clark's studiously composed yet off-kilter music, where danger always seems to lurk just beyond the next spazzy guitar solo. "Cruel" is a comedy of horrors in which Clark is kidnapped by a mom-starved family, who proceed to torment the singer before sending her to an early grave. Literally. Terri Timely talked to us about manure, twisted little girls, and reinventing the music-video guitar solo.

Pitchfork: Your other St. Vincent videos hinted at dark comedy, but this one really hits that tone head-on.

Ian Kibbey: It's a really hard thing to do because it can seem pretentious or really cheesy. But Annie's a pretty funny person. Over the last two videos, there's been a lot of laughter on the set. This video is like a crazy and dark version of that Kurt Russell/Goldie Hawn movie Overboard, where Goldie Hawn falls overboard and gets amnesia, and Kurt Russell takes her and says, "You're my wife!"

Corey Creasey: Actually, Annie brought that movie up when we pitched this idea to her. She was definitely tuned in to the fact that there was a sense of humor to it. The comedy element ended up being more prominent than we expected.

IK: It was a pleasant surprise because what Annie had to go through was really bizarre and fucked up and funny. Every time there was something that seemed a little grueling, or there was a question about Annie feeling uncomfortable, she wanted to push it more. It would've been bad if we were like, "All right, now this little girl is going to waterboard you," and Annie didn't want to do it.

CC: For the bathtub shots, we initially just told the little girl Cassidy to gently put Annie's head underwater. But the first couple of takes were totally fake. So we were like, "OK Cassidy, really try and keep her down." She really got into it, and, for a moment, I was a little bit worried that she wasn't going to let Annie up. I actually had to tell her, "OK, stop! Stop!"

IK: That was really bad because somebody overheard me talking about the take and how much we liked it because you can see the little girl's muscles flexing to hold Annie's head down. They were like, "That sounds really fucked up."

Pitchfork: [laughs] You guys definitely have problems.

IK: The little girl was on this pageant reality show called "Toddlers and Tiaras". Everybody on set was in love with her because she had this weird, quiet force to her.

CC: Actually, the character she played wasn't too far off from the real thing-- she was a dark little kid. When we did her audition, her mom was like, "She'd be a vampire if she could." And the girl had this really deep, gravelly voice and a little bit of a lisp, so she almost sounded like this little old British man.

We had to have someone dig this three-foot-deep hole in the backyard for the grave, and this poor PA was out there all day long doing it. Then I looked back there at one point, and the PA is in a lawn chair, taking a smoke break, and Cassidy is digging the grave. It was really fucked up. We're all going to jail.

Pitchfork: My favorite shot is the one where Annie's playing guitar while in the trunk of the car, it definitely has this bizarre, iconic quality.

IK: What's cool about music videos is that you can add and take away things without destroying the narrative because the narrative works in its own language. We like playing with these conventions, like adding a prop somewhere and not addressing it. With feature films, you try not to call attention to the set and you try to hide the seams, but sometimes it's fun to really accentuate the seams in videos. You're using it to show the audience that this world uses a weird calculus.

CC: Typically, guitar solos are really heroic-- like, in a Guns N' Roses video, we'd cut to Slash on the edge of a cliff with the wind blowing and the cameras circling around him in a helicopter. But Annie's guitar solo doesn't take itself too seriously in the song, and we were riffing on that, like, "What's the least heroic way of showing a guitar solo?"

Pitchfork: Though I get the feeling this family has good intentions about what they're doing at the beginning of the video, you get the impression this isn't the first time they've gone through with this kidnapping thing.

IK: Yeah. There are some bones and tattered cloth at the bottom of the grave-- maybe it has been re-dug recently. We wanted the family to have a sadness to them, but the distance from victim to aggressor is very short. They want a mom, and this person might work out. If she doesn't, they'll fucking kill her.

CC: Or they'll get a new one. The mom is disposable. It feels like the family is frozen in time. We wanted the kidnapping scene to be violent, but we also wanted the family to be likable and not your quintessential serial killers.

Pitchfork: Why do you think Annie's character stays with this family?

IK: It gets complicated when you realize that the front door is not locked. It's almost like Stockholm syndrome where she wants to be accepted and provide what these people need. Why does everybody set themselves up for disappointment? Why do people return to the same place for Christmas when they know fucked up shit is going to happen? We're gluttons for punishment.

Pitchfork: Was Annie really buried in dirt for those grave shots?

IK: It was a table that we raised and lowered. There was ammonia and real manure in there-- manure looked better, so we used that. She would tear up, and we'd have to pull her out because her eyes would get too red. The smell of shit and chemicals was pretty gnarly. But she was like, "No, I'm fine!" It definitely makes it so much easier for us and the crew to work really hard when you have somebody who is so unwavering in their energy.

CC: The table looked like some Puritan punishment device. I read that if you bury someone in sand, you can collapse their lungs from the pressure. It's crazy. Certain materials are too dense. When she was up to her eyes in dirt, that was kind of gnarly, because the whole time we had people throwing shovels full of dirt down in the grave as we were filming her. I think we got dirt in her eyes a few times.

Pitchfork: Do you think we're all capable of this extreme cruelty?

IK: What tends to be a little funnier and more interesting and nuanced is low-grade cruelty. You're more apt to identify with the stuff that people don't even realize is cruel, and laugh at it in a Larry David sort of way. This video goes between Cruelty and cruelty.

CC: Like, there's something assaulting about a pointing a gun at somebody, even if it is a toy.

IK: While we were shooting, somebody picked up the gun and pointed it at someone else's head, and it seemed really inappropriate. In the world of movies, that's nothing. But when you have something so overtly violent mixed with something that's just kind-of violent, it makes you rethink why the latter is creepier.